Peer-to-Peer (“P2P”) fragmented file sharing systems such as BitTorrent, eDonkey2000, eMule, and KaZaA have become a very popular medium for distributing content on the Internet—especially content that is relatively large, such as a video file. However, these systems can be problematic from a reliability and/or security perspective, which has limited the commercial viability of using such systems to distribute valuable content items.
Systems, methods, apparatus, and software are described herein for distributing content in a way that ameliorates some or all of the problems described above.